Appendix “C”: The Shortcomings of the Telephone in England

To anyone who has had practical experience of the United States telephone service, resulting from private enterprise, the inferior condition of the English service excites no wonder. The history of the telephone in the United Kingdom during the past 30 years has been a lamentable tale of bureaucratic blundering, tolerated by a community which has failed to perceive the potential value of this method of communication and to insist upon its effective organization on a business basis. As the result of a short-sighted Government policy, of official mismanagement, and the parochial attitude of local authorities, the number of telephones per hundred of the population in Great Britain to-day is 1.4, as against 8.1 in the United States. London, the greatest city in the world, boasts 2.8 telephones for every hundred of its inhabitants, as against a percentage of 24.0 in Los Angeles.

One of the chief obstacles barring the way to satisfactory development of the telephone as a public utility has been the traditional conservatism of the Post Office and the fixed idea of protecting the Government's telegraph revenues against effective competition by the telephone. In 1889 the Postmaster-General (after declining to purchase the telephone patents) brought a suit to prevent the Edison Company from establishing telephone exchanges in London, as constituting an infringement of his telegraph monopoly. Successful administration of an industrial enterprise like the telephone requires vigilant initiative and elasticity.